Give Donald Trump credit. With his call to ban all Muslims from coming into the United States, he has drawn President Obama into the political fray.
Trump’s position is that the anti-American terrorist problem lies with all Muslims, insinuating that deep down they are all enemies of America and the West and, therefore, should be barred from coming into the country.
While Trump hasn’t specifically addressed the fact that the Orlando shooter was an American citizen, the inference one can easily draw from his position is that every Muslim living here in the United States, citizen or not, is a potential Fifth Columnist who is hell-bent on initiating a terrorist attack against Americans. My hunch is that Trump is quietly studying President Franklin Roosevelt’s incarceration of Japanese-Americans and intends to apply FDR’s model to Muslim-Americans.
Obama, on the other hand, takes the same position that Hillary Clinton takes and, for that matter, that George W. Bush and the neocons took: That the problem lies not with regular Muslims but rather with Muslims who ‘hate America for its freedom and values’ or who have become ‘radicalized.’
Actually, the Obama-Clinton-Bush position is just as ludicrous as the Trump position. That’s because the problem is not with Muslims, either regular or radicalized. Instead, the problem is U. S. interventionism in the Middle East, specifically the fact that for some 25 years the U. S. national-security establishment’s death machine has been killing and maiming people in the Middle East and destroying their homes, businesses, and countries in regime-change operations.
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on June 16, 2016.
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